Most Battlefield 3 owners are probably tucking in to the excellent Back to Karkand DLC expansion pack that has just gone live on Xbox 360 and PC, but if you own the console version of the game, are you satisfied with the overall quality of the game, with the known fact that the PC version is DICE’s preferred platform?

Yes, if you are not aware, the console versions of Battlefield 3 are essentially a port of the PC version although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The console versions still play great and although they may be stripped of some features only found in the PC version like Commo Rose and 64 player support, they definitely offer the same core gameplay as featured in their PC counterpart.

DICE has recently come out and stated that porting the game, which utilizes their brand new Frostbite 2 engine, was a big challenge for them as they had to work with limited memory on console. Here is a recent quote from DICE Rendering Architect Johan Anderson in a recent interview with AMD:

“It was a big challenge to bring up the game and engine on the consoles after that [building the game on PC]. A lot of low-level optimization and adapting systems to the specific strengths of the platforms to try and keep as much as possible of the gameplay and visuals while both fitting into 30 fps as well as a fixed low memory budget.”

While it is plain to see to clear differences in visuals between the PC version and the console versions of Battlefield 3, DICE came up a solution which surely saved the company from a backlash of criticism from users, and a solution which ultimately proved crucial in terms of graphics quality on console. This solution came in the form of a separate HD texture pack, which was an optional install for the Xbox 360 version of the game, but already came included with the PS3 version. The result improved graphics drastically on console, although obviously it was still no match for the lead PC platform.

If you have the console version of Battlefield 3, are you pretty happy with the final result, are you unhappy that features such as Commo Rose have been left out for console?